


fragments

by perfectlyrose



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Echoes of Clara Oswin Oswald, Ficlet, Gen, Introspection, Mentions of Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-11
Updated: 2017-04-11
Packaged: 2018-10-17 16:04:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 390
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10597467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perfectlyrose/pseuds/perfectlyrose
Summary: Sometimes, Clara can remember bits of all the lives she’s lived, all the echoes that she made herself into once upon a time.





	

Sometimes, Clara can remember bits of all the lives she’s lived, all the echoes that she made herself into once upon a time. A few times she gets an overwhelming sense of deja-vu, of nostalgia, when she looks out at what is a new-to-her vista. More times she wakes up gasping for air, wakes up with a scream hovering on her lips and about to escape.

(It’s not all memories of beautiful views and favorite tastes and a snippet of remembered love. It’s memories of dying over and over again in a hundred different ways that lead to the same result.)

(It’s a well of loneliness and longing that lives in a hard ball underneath her breastbone that she never quite understands, that never quite goes away.)

She wasn’t ever sure that “echo” was the right phrase for her doppelgangers scattered through time and space. They had her face, had bits of her personality ingrained in them but they were all products of their times, they all had their own lives independent of hers except for the goal of saving the Doctor.

(Clara told herself over and over that they all had their own lives, that they were independent people who made their own choices.)

(It didn’t stop her from feeling guilty over all the ones who died saving the Doctor.)

(It didn’t stop her from wishing that they would stay put in their own lives and stop haunting hers.)

Those nights she woke in a cold sweat it was with someone else’s memories in her head. It took hours to feel entirely like herself again, to pull her present self, the supposed original Clara Oswald, to the forefront.

(She blamed the dark circles under her eyes, the tiredness behind them, on Danny, on the Doctor, on her grief.)

(She never told anyone that she could remember lives she had never lived.)

(She was an English teacher, she was supposed to live thousands of lives through the stories she read, not through this fragmented version of reincarnation.)

(She bundled the secret close to her heart, next to that hard ball of loneliness and grief, and smiled at everyone until they forgot the darkness that clung to her like a lover.)

(Clara might be a thousand different people but she was a brilliant liar as each and every one of them.)


End file.
